Hungary: Magazine publishes anti-Semitic image of Jewish leader on cover

Via JTA:

A Hungarian Jewish leader was pictured on the cover of a pro-government magazine surrounded by images of money.

The image of Andras Heisler, head of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, or Mazsihisz, the country’s largest Jewish group, was published late last week on the front page of the Figyelo weekly.

The magazine accuses Heisler and Mazsihisz of accounting irregularities in connection with a state-funded synagogue renovation project in Budapest including a Jewish museum, according to the AFP news service. Mazsihisz denies the allegation.

The cover image “revives centuries-old stereotypes against our community,” the group said in a statement published on its website.

“The appearance on a front cover of such incitement against a religious leader without any factual basis is unprecedented,” the statement said, calling it “deliberate character assassination.”

The cover was published about a day after the Hungarian government pledged to spend $1.7 million every year on projects to combat anti-Semitism in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, according to the AFP.

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Hungary: Jobbik Deputy Leader to Step Down After Anti-Semitic Recording Surfaces

Via Hungary Today:

Jobbik deputy group leader and parliamentary notary István Szávay announced his immediate resignation on Thursday following the release of recordings containing anti-Semitic comments and details of an alleged assault.

On Wednesday, Hir TV presented a sound recording of Szávay privately informing fellow party members at a spring congress that he had verbally and physically assaulted a Jewish woman in a pub the previous day. According to Szávay, the woman initiated the conflict:

“She was yelling, ‘Nazis are stinking here,’ and I just knocked her out, dirty Jew, pakk, just like this.”

He admitted that the recording and the anti-Semitic comments were authentic, however, he insisted that he did not actually physically harm the woman.

In a message posted to his Facebook page on Thursday, Szávay said he informed group leader Márton Gyöngyösi about his resignation, which was accepted, and announced that he will remain a member of the Parliament.

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Hungarian Jews see anti-Semitism as a serious problem, survey finds

Via Times of Israel:

Two-thirds of Hungarian Jews believe anti-Semitism is a serious problem in their country, according to a new survey, though fewer than half say they have experienced it firsthand.

The survey, which the prominent sociologists András Kovács and Ildikó Barna conducted in 2017 through face-to-face interviews with 1,879 Jewish adults, was published Thursday at a news conference in Budapest. It is a follow-up to a 1999 survey of Hungarian Jews that asked about perceptions on a range of topics.

On anti-Semitism, 48 percent of the respondents said they heard anti-Semitic rhetoric on the street in the year preceding the survey, down from 75% in 1999. The number of respondents who said they had experienced at least three instances of anti-Semitism was 6%, compared to 16% in 1999.
 

However, asked to quantify the extent of anti-Semitism in Hungary, 55% of the respondents said it was “great” and another 10% said it was “very great.”

“In 2017, the situation was perceived as much worse than it had been perceived in 1999,” the authors of the survey wrote.

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Anti-Semitic incidents drop sharply in Poland and Hungary, watchdogs say

Via Times of Israel:

Despite widespread concerns recently of a rise in anti-Semitism in Poland and Hungary, watchdog groups in both countries said the number of incidents recorded there in 2017 dropped sharply from the previous year.

In Hungary, the Jewish community’s watchdog on anti-Semitism, TEV, said this week in its annual report for 2017 that it had recorded 37 anti-Semitic incidents compared to 48 in 2016, constituting a 23 percent decrease. Some 100,000 Jews live in Hungary.

In Poland, which is home to some 20,000 Jews, Deputy National Prosecutor Agata Gałuszka-Górska last month said that the number of anti-Semitic incidents had dropped by 30 percent, to 112 last year from 160 in 2016. Anti-Semitic hate crimes accounted for about 6 percent of all hate crimes recorded, she said.

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Hungary: The safest country for European Jews? Try Hungary

Via PJ Media (David P. Goldman):

Last Friday evening I put on a kippah and walked half an hour across Budapest to the Keren Or synagogue maintained by the Budapest Chabad. After violent attacks on Jews in German streets, the leaders of Germany’s Jewish community warned Jews last month not to wear a kippah or any other visible sign of Jewish identification in public. The French community issued such warnings years ago. Belgian TV could not find a single Jew in Brussels willing to wear a kippah in public. I walked across Budapest four times (for Friday evening and Saturday daytime services), and no-one looked at my kippah twice. At services I met Hasidim who had walked to synagogue with kaftan and shtreimel, the traditional round fur hat. Whatever residual anti-Semitism remains among Hungarians, it doesn’t interfere with the open embrace of Jewish life. There are no risks to Jews because there are very few Muslim migrants.

On any given Friday evening, the Keren Or synagogue—one of several Chabad houses in Budapest—hosts two hundred people for dinner. Jewish life isn’t just flourishing in Budapest. It’s roaring with ruach, and livened by a growing Israeli presence. About 100,000 Israelis have dual Hungarian citizenship; many own property in the country and vote in Hungarian elections.

Prime Minister Orban has been a close friend of Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu for twenty years. When Orban first was elected prime minister in 1998 in the thick of an economic crisis, he asked then-Finance Minister Netanyahu for help, and Netanyahu lent him some of his staff to shape Hungary’s economic program. I asked everyone at Keren Or who spoke English what they thought of Orban. In that gathering the prime minister would have polled 100%.

Orban, in turn, is one of Israel’s few staunch supporters overseas. Earlier this month Hungary, along with Rumania and the Czech Republic, vetoed a European Community resolution condemning the U.S. for moving its embassy to Jerusalem. Cynics dismiss this as an instance of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That isn't the case. Hungary is in the middle of a nasty fight with the European Community over migration, and stands to lose up to $4 billion in EC subsidies—roughly 3% of the country’s GDP. It doesn’t help Hungary to provoke Brussels by sabotaging its diplomatic efforts, as in the case of the Jerusalem embassy vote. On the contrary, Hungary is spending precious political capital in defense of the Jewish state, to its own possible disadvantage.

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Hungary: Armed guards protect Jewish restaurants in France and Belgium but not in Budapest

Frank Furedi @ Spiked:

[...] If you listened only to Western media, you would think Hungary had become the heartland of fascism. In numerous media outlets it was darkly suggested that the re-election of Orban would constitute a threat akin to Hitler gaining power in the 1930s. Lurid headlines warned of the imminent collapse of Hungary into authoritarian rule. Canadian Michael Ignatieff, the president and rector of Budapest’s Western-financed Central European University (CEU), warned that the election would determine whether ‘Hungary consolidates itself as a democracy or whether it aligns with Putin and the ascendant authoritarians of the 21st century’.

When I talk to a couple of Western students from the CEU, it is clear that they believe Ignatieff’s warning. They warn me about the unprecedented prevalence of anti-Jewish sentiment in Budapest. They don’t believe me when I point out that if you understand Hungarian, you will find that such sentiments are probably weaker in Budapest than they are in Paris or many other Western European cities. When I tell them that I have seen armed guards protecting Jewish restaurants in France and Belgium but not in Budapest, they look uncomfortable and change the subject.

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Hungarian leaders say they keep Jews safe by keeping out Muslim immigrants

Via Times of Israel:

At a conference about anti-Semitism in Europe, senior Hungarian officials said the absence of violence against Jews in their country owed to its refusal to admit Muslim immigrants.

The assertion, which at least one Jewish expert on anti-Semitism disputed, came amid criticism of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s right-wing government by other European leaders of his immigration policy, and a dispute between the Hungarian leader and some Jewish community leaders who accuse Orban of encouraging or tolerating anti-Semitic rhetoric.

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Whereas other European countries have seen jihadist terrorist attacks against Jews and others in recent years, “Hungary has been consistently able to protect its citizens and residents, its borders and its fundamental elements of statehood from mass immigration and international terrorism,” Minister of State for Security Policy István Mikola said Wednesday at an event in Budapest titled “Are Europe’s Jews Safe?” and organized by the Hungarian Jewry’s watchdog on anti-Semitism, the Action and Protection Foundation.

Csaba Latorkai, deputy state secretary for priority social affairs, noted the 2015 killing of a Jewish security guard in Denmark by an Islamist along with other attacks, including the murder of 137 people in Paris by other Islamists later that year.

“Taking security and administrative measures to prevent such acts, the Hungarian government acted, and so in the autumn of 2015 it decided to set up a border fence, introduced a legal closing of borders,” Latorkai said in his speech, adding it was “in order to protect citizens and make Hungary one of the most secure places in world. No one should be afraid that there may be attacks on our streets.”

(...)

The chairman of the Action and Protection Foundation, Daniel Bodnar, said at the conference that while ant-Semitic violence remains extremely rare in Hungary, the country has seen anti-Semitic rhetoric proliferating over the past decade, notably through the far-right Jobbik party and its affiliated media.

In 2016 and 2015, his foundation recorded 23 and 53 incidents in Hungary, which has approximately 100,000 Jews, with no physical assaults of individuals. It has initiated dozens of criminal cases since its establishment in 2012.

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Hungary: Soros and the Left's inversion of anti-semitism

By Evelyn Gordon:

The progressive left has been revising the definition of anti-Semitism for some time. It’s already old news that it no longer considers it anti-Semitic to attack pro-Israel Jews for their Jewish identity. But this process has recently taken a new twist. Not only has the definition of anti-Semitism been narrowed to exclude attacks on pro-Israel Jews, but it has also been broadened to cover all attacks on progressive leftists who happen to be Jews, even if the attack relates solely to the target’s left-wing activism. 

Consider, for instance, the uproar over the recent Hungarian campaign against George Soros, a leading left-wing activist who also happens to be Jewish. As part of his reelection bid, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban plastered the country with anti-illegal immigration posters featuring a smiling Soros bearing the slogan “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh” and a statement that 99 percent of Hungarians oppose illegal immigration. Orban, who accuses Soros of funding progressive groups in Hungary that lobby for “settling a million migrants” in the country, has also called Soros himself a “billionaire speculator” and an “American financial speculator attacking Hungary.” 

The campaign has outraged many people, ostensibly out of concern for anti-Semitism. The head of Hungary’s Jewish Federation protested to Orban, saying that despite not being “openly anti-Semitic,” the campaign could spark anti-Semitism. So did Israel’s ambassador to Hungary, using language which strongly implied the campaign was anti-Semitic without actually saying so, until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (correctly) ordered a retraction. A senior European Union official termed Orban’s use of “speculator” anti-Semitic. The Associated Press even ran a story in May headlined “Demonization of Soros recalls old anti-Semitic conspiracies.” 

Some attacks on Soros are anti-Semitic, like when someone at an anti-refugee rally in Poland in 2015 set fire to an effigy of an Orthodox Jew which he said represented Soros. That’s classic anti-Semitism; it implies both that the real problem is Soros’s Jewishness rather than anything he did, and that all Jews are responsible for Soros’s actions. 

The Hungarian campaign, however, targets Soros not for his Jewishness, which it never even mentions, but for his actions; specifically, the fact that he is one of the main financial backers of pro-immigration organizations in Hungary. 

According to data provided to the Associated Press by Soros’s Open Society Foundations, he has so far donated $12 billion worldwide, of which $400 million has gone to Hungary. I doubt Hungary has many other donors providing funding of that magnitude for progressive causes (the only kind Soros funds). So if you believe it’s problematic for outsiders to pour huge sums of money into a country to promote agendas most of the country considers detrimental to its well-being—a position I sympathize with, given the damage similar tactics have caused Israel—then Soros is a legitimate target for reasons having nothing to do with his Jewishness. 

Moreover, while the word “speculator” is often used as anti-Semitic code for “Jew,” in Soros’s case, it’s the literal truth. Soros didn’t make his fortune by producing better widgets. He made it by speculating on the markets, where he’s especially famous for having raked in $1 billion in a single day by betting against the British pound, thereby earning the nickname “the man who broke the Bank of England.” So if you believe that financial speculation is detrimental to society, then Soros is the ultimate embodiment of this particular economic evil. That, too, has nothing to do with his Jewishness.

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Related:
Hungary: 'Government campaign against Soros on immigration has nothing to do with anti-Semitism'

Hungary: Jews ask PM Orban to end 'bad dream' of antisemitism

Via Jerusalem Post:

The campaign focuses on Soros, 86, a Hungarian Jew who emigrated after World War Two, made a fortune in the United States and has long been heavily involved with groups promoting liberal democratic and open-border values in post-Communist eastern Europe, a cause at odds with Orban's world view.

Billboards around Hungary and full-page ads in media across the central European country depict Soros grinning contentedly against a blue background with the inscription: "Don't let George Soros have the last laugh."

Some Soros billboards have been defaced with the words "stinking Jew" in magic marker. Around 100,000 Jews live in Hungary.

"This campaign, while not openly antisemitic, clearly has the potential to ignite uncontrolled emotions, including antisemitism," the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Congregations (Mazsihisz) said in an emailed statement.

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Hungarian state TV airs Iranian leader calling George Soros ‘evil Zionist-American’

Via JTA:

A public broadcaster in Hungary broadcast an Iranian leader attacking George Soros as “an evil Zionist-American multi-billionaire,”  spurring condemnation from Hungarian Jewry.

On Wednesday “Hirado,” the main news show of the state MTVA channel, also included quotes from Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the supreme spiritual leader in Iran, saying that Soros was responsible for destabilizing and defeating former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s regime.

Critics of the broadcast, including Mazsihisz, the umbrella group of Hungarian Jewish communities, said it risks stoking anti-Semitic sentiment.

...

Mazsihisz condemned the inclusion of the quote by Khamenei, saying in a statement Friday that it echoes the purest and most common form “of anti-Jewish sentiments in the Hungarian extreme-right media.” The umbrella group also noted that the MTI state news agency declined to quote or report on its statement because of what Mazsihisz said were concerns it might “damage the credibility of the state media and its business interests.”

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Hungary: A government campaign against George Soros splits Jews

Via JTA:

Occurring in a conservative society that is still struggling with the complicity of its wartime governments in the murder of nearly half a million Jews during the Holocaust, the campaign against a Jewish billionaire has prompted warnings that Orban’s crusade against Soros is anti-Semitic. Earlier this month Frans Timmermans, a senior EU official, suggested that the Hungarian government is channeling anti-Semitic sentiment to delegitimize a powerful critic of its nationalist policies.

That view, however, is not shared by the main leaders of Hungary’s 100,000-strong Jewish community. In interviews with JTA, its leaders rejected allegations that the government is using anti-Semitic dog whistles consciously. At the same time, they warned that the campaign against Soros may embolden anti-Semites regardless of the government’s intentions.

“Orban is not anti-Semitic. His government is not anti-Semitic,” said Rabbi Zoltan Radnoti, the chairman of the rabbinical council of the Mazsihisz Jewish umbrella group in Hungary. “I believe that Soros was selected as a target because he is a progressive billionaire regardless of the fact that he’s Jewish.”

Yet Orban failed to stop the anti-Soros campaign even after it appeared that the rhetoric “may have a possible anti-Semitic interpretation,” Radnoti added, saying the prime minister “should have known that this campaign of hatred and scapegoating would increase anti-Semitic feelings.”

Soros, an 86-year-old banking and investment magnate who survived the Holocaust in hiding in Budapest, is not particularly known for funding Jewish causes in Hungary — or anywhere else.

(...)

Upping the ante, Orban gave a speech last month at the European Parliament calling Soros a “financial speculator” who is now “attacking Hungary and who — despite ruining the lives of millions of European people with his financial speculations” is nonetheless “received by the EU’s top leaders.” The scathing rhetoric was followed by the appearance in Hungary of posters demonizing Soros, which are widely believed to be printed and distributed by nationalists with the government’s blessing.

And that’s a problem, according to Radnoti, because it risks awakening anti-Semitic sentiments that Radnoti believes Orban neither shares nor seeks to embolden.

“The problem is not that Soros was selected as a public enemy because he is Jewish,” Radnoti said. “The problem is that in a country like Hungary, which has a xenophobia and anti-Semitism problem, the government should have known better than to take someone who happens to be Jewish and make him a public enemy over his globalist politics. It’s not anti-Semitic, it’s just irresponsible.”

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Hungary’s Ugly State-Sponsored Holocaust Revisionism

Via Tablet (h/t glykosymoritis):

Does it matter if a country consciously lies about its past? An excerpt from the new book, ‘The End of Europe' By James Kirchick

Why does it matter if a country consciously lies about its past? Inculcating in future generations a litany of myths about national innocence, perpetual victimhood, and lost honor grants license to irresponsible and dangerous behavior. Today’s fight over memory politics in Hungary echoes the mid-1980s German Historikerstreit, or historians’ controversy. That dispute centered on whether the crimes of Nazi Germany were singular evils or comparable to other mass atrocities, in particular, those of Stalinism. The intellectual combatants of the Historikerstreit brought no new facts to bear but only argued over how to interpret what was already widely known. In the words of the German essayist Peter Schneider, so heated was the argumentation, so deeply did it impinge on Germany’s understanding of itself, that the fusillade of polemics in the feuilletons attracted “a level of curiosity among the general public normally aroused by photos of the British royal family in swimsuits.”

(...)

After much back and forth, Nolte and his confrères were soundly refuted in the court of German public opinion. Among Germans today, it is a consensus view that the Holocaust was a singular event and that Germany has a duty to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and impart it to future generations. Germans have so thoroughly imbibed the awful lessons of their history that their country is one of the more immune in Europe to far-right populism.

Hungary, by contrast, has undertaken no such reckoning. In the same way that Ernst Nolte wanted ordinary Germans to feel a straightforward patriotism, uncomplicated by guilt over the Nazi past, Viktor Orbán and Mária Schmidt wish to muddy the distinctions between victim and perpetrator in order to present a simplistic view of Hungarian history. Nolte’s complaint that preoccupation with the Holocaust served “the interests of the persecuted and their descendants in a permanent, privileged status” sounds indistinguishable from Schmidt’s allegation that the progeny of the victims of Hungarian fascism “would like to consider their ancestors’ tragic fate an inheritable and advantageous privilege.” It is inconceivable that a German chancellor today would express a desire to “preserve Germany for the Germans.” Yet this is precisely the sort of language, redolent of the 1930s, that Viktor Orbán uses today about Hungary. Convinced that Hungarians are perennial victims of global machinations—abetted by his “evil” domestic opponents—and unencumbered by comprehension of, or a sense of humility about, where heedless nationalism has taken his country in the past, Orbán feels emboldened to advance a chauvinist political agenda.

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Hungary is removing statue of philosopher György (Georg) Lukács – He was Marxist and Jewish

Via Hungarian Free Press (h/t glykosymoritis):

Lukács was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His book Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness) remains mandatory reading for those studying philosophy. Thomas Mann was inspired by Lukács and portrayed him as Naphta in The Magic Mountain. Lukács had a major influence on forming the philosophical foundations of the New Left, both in Europe and America and his works are taught in major universities all over the world.

Why does Jobbik want to remove the statue? The fact that Lukács was a Marxist and Communist has little to do with it. Today several prominent Communists (e.g.  Zoltán Komócsin) have streets named after them in Hungary.

Likely Jobbik’s trouble with Lukács is with his Jewish roots. Born Löwinger, his father József changed the family’s name to the Hungarian-sounding Lukács in the late 1800s when György was a toddler, and the family was fully assimilated into Hungarian society. They even obtained the status of Hungarian nobility and were part of the country’s rich and educated class.

Although Lukács had nothing to do with Judaism, Jobbik calls him Löwinger to emphasize his background and they even connect him and other Hungarian cultural and political figures with Jewish roots to the blood libel of Tiszaeszlár of 1882! Jobbik-controlled publications often publish lengthy anti-Semitic tirades (only in Hungarian) similar to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Jobbik politicians claim that Hungary’s culture and the “nation’s soul” have been poisoned by Jews like Lukács. This “pollution” must be “cleansed” and the ruling Fidesz party seems willing to assist the Kulturkampf to rid the country from this “Judeo Bolshevik menace. “

The removal of the Lukács statue is part of an effort to please Jobbik’s and Fidesz’s anti-Semitic voters. It is disguised as an anti-Marxist campaign and as usual in today’s Hungarian politics, Jobbik and Fidesz work tightly together as a carefully choreographed tag team.

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Hungary: Jobbik chapter protests party's Hanukkah greeting

Via Ynet News (h/t Honestly Concerned):

Hungary's once virulently anti-Semitic Jobbik party tried to show a more tolerant face this year by sending Hanukkah greetings to local Jews. Neither their rabbi nor some Jobbik members appreciated the gesture.

(...)

Although the party does appear to be softening its strident nationalist tone, its recent history of anti-Semitic tactics—such as denouncing Israel and demanding lists of Hungarian Jews who pose a "national security risk"—seems too fresh to be overcome easily.

In his greeting for Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, Vona wrote: "We wish this time of reflection and joy offers a chance of spiritual renewal and, like the celebration of light, emanates real brightness that can show the way."

A Jobbik chapter in the Budapest suburb of Vecsés protested on Facebook, saying, "Jobbik Vecsés does NOT greet Jews on the occasion of Hanukkah (or what the f***) ... If anyone might have that crazy idea, our organisation will not support them!"
Köves, a rabbi of the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement, also gave the Jobbik greetings the cold shoulder.
"We normally appreciate such greetings, but the greetings from you, the leaders of Jobbik, rather surprised and confused us," he wrote in an open letter to Vona. "I think you would do better to make these gestures at the forums you have used to spread hate, filth and darkness, not light."

Vona told the daily Magyar Nemzet on Friday that the response by the Vecsés Jobbik chapter was unacceptable and he would expel the members who posted the slur. "Nobody who talks like that has a place in this party," he said.
To Köves, Vona wrote that he wanted to "build bridges not walls" and vowed to work for reconciliation between Hungarian Christians and Jews.

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Hungary's thriving Jewish community faces spike in antisemitism, Holocaust revisionism

Via Jerusalem Post (h/t Honestly Concerned):

Budapest has 23 shuls, often within sight of one another, and numerous Jewish institutions – including schools, hospices, and a hospital – for its estimated 50,000 Jewish residents, who comprise the vast majority of the country’s Jewish population.

Take a closer look, though, and you discover a darker side to this ostensibly quotidian idyll of Jewish revival in post-communist Hungary.

Szabadság Tér (Freedom Square) lies within easy walking distance of the Dohány Street synagogue, which draws busloads of tourists from around the globe daily as Europe’s largest shul and a historical hub for the homegrown liberal stream of Neolog Judaism. At the entrance to the square stands a statue to the “Victims of the German Occupation.”

Erected in 2014 by the country’s democratically elected but increasingly autocratic conservative government, the statue commemorates the Nazis’ seizure of power in Hungary on March 19, 1944. It leaves the identity of those “victims” unexplained, but there is no real mystery.

The memorial features a German imperial eagle swooping down, talons at the ready, on the archangel Gabriel, who is depicted as an effete and defenseless youth and is a stand-in for wartime Hungary. In the recrudescence of historical revisionism that has swept postcommunist societies from Hungary to Lithuania, the memorial seeks to whitewash the role of many Hungarians in the persecution and murder of Jews during World War II by lumping the perpetrators and their Jewish victims together as equally guiltless victims of the Germans.

“This statue is a symbol of the Hungarian government’s blatant disregard of history in the service of a nationalist agenda,” fumes Fruzsina Magyar, a Jewish-Hungarian dramaturge who has been at the forefront of rowdy protests against the statue by grassroots groups, both Jewish and non-Jewish, since early 2014, when its construction got underway.

“It’s a disgrace. It tells you about the state of affairs in this country,” she adds.

For months on end, the protesters – led by Magyar and her husband, Imre Mécs, a leftwing politician who once spent time in prison for his role in the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule in 1956 – sought but failed to stop the memorial from being built through daily acts of nonviolent resistance. Then on July 21 of that year, when the statue was to be officially unveiled, hundreds of protesters formed a human chain around the memorial, bickering with right-wing provocateurs and tussling with police officers, to prevent the ceremony from happening. They succeeded: the statue has still not been officially unveiled.

Two years on, many local Jews are still protesting it. They gather daily at the site for discussions, fiery speeches, poetry readings, performances and concerts. On a recent Friday afternoon, some three dozen protesters, including several elderly Holocaust survivors, sang and clapped along energetically to a Hungarian rendition of “Hava Nagila,” performed for their benefit by an operetta singer on a patch of lawn behind the statue.

Just a few hundred meters away, on a nearby square outside the country’s flamboyantly gothic Parliament building, a different group of people was singing another tune. Some members of the widely popular far-right party Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary) had arrived bearing flags and insignias styled after those once carried by members of the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement, which played a pivotal role in the murder and deportation of 600,000 Hungarian Jews in 1944 and 1945. Their middle-aged speaker railed against “alien-hearted influences” and the “tyranny of minorities” (code words for Jews) before a thunderstorm scattered the gathered.

“I think antisemitism is worse now than it was in 1938, before the war,” laments György László, a Jewish engineer who frequents Freedom Square to meet like-minded Jews. “Most people in this country have been inculcated with antisemitic views.”

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Hungary: Jobbik leader says if he lived in Greece, he would vote for antisemitic far-left party

Nick Thorpe at the BBC asks whether Hungary's Jobbik is "really ditching far-right past?" (h/t glykosymoritis).

Gabor Vona, head of Jobbik, claims it is.  After all, if he would live in Greece, he would vote for the far-left Syriza party.  Thorpe forgets to mention, however, that Jobbik and Syriza both share a hatred of Jews and Israel.  You don't need to be a Nazi to hate Jews.

Jobbik is changing fast, its leader Gabor Vona, 38, claims.

From a radical nationalist party which until recently insulted Hungary's Roma (Gypsy) and Jewish communities, to a moderate "conservative people's party", which offers the only realistic chance of ousting Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party.

But is the makeover genuine and could Jobbik really move to the centre?

(...)

Nowadays, Gabor Vona prefers to avoid political labels. "If I lived in Greece I would probably vote for Syriza, though they are supposed to be on the left," he suggests.

 And unlike other party leaders associated with the far right, he admires the Sufi tradition of Islam: something he has struggled to explain to his vehemently anti-migrant party.

Hungary: Explosives seized in raids on neo-Nazi group

Via Times of Israel:

Hungarian special police forces detained 12 people and seized arms and explosives late Tuesday in raids targeting a neo-Nazi group implicated in the killing of a police officer, officials said.

The operation comes three weeks after the killing, in which the officer was shot in the head while searching the home of the head of the Magyar Arcvonal movement.

“Special police forces and anti-terrorist units conducted targeted raids” in about eight locations in Budapest and the northwest of the country, said a police statement.

Twelve people were detained in the raids, “during which explosive materials and various firearms, including pistols and submachine guns, were seized,” it said.

All those detained were linked to branches of the Magyar Arcvonal movement, it said.

Formed in 1989, the paramilitary group is notorious notably for operations to intimidate Jewish and homosexual communities.

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Hungary: "I don’t know what this Jewish thing is. It’s different."

Via BuzzFeed:

A graduate from Dublin’s Trinity College, Gyongyosi is a member of parliament for the radical right-wing party Jobbik. He also serves as the party’s deputy parliamentary leader and is vice chairman of parliament’s committee on foreign affairs.

(...)

The Jobbik MP has in the past called on the government to draw up a list of Jews.

Asked to explain this position, the MP tells BuzzFeed News that it is a matter of transparency and national security. He likens the discussion to the double citizenship and Turkish identity debate in “politically correct” Germany, or to Congress in the US asking representatives and senators to disclose personal information and conflicts of interest.

“We don’t know what being Jewish is,” he says. “Is it a religion? A culture? A social background? Sometimes it’s a genetic heritage. I don’t know what this Jewish thing is. It’s different. It’s not like Hungarian or Italian.

“Here, we have lots of Hungarian Jews. That is not a problem. But if a Zionist Jew lives in Hungary, the question arises for me whether they are loyal towards Hungary or Israel.”

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Hungary: Foreign Affairs Minister claims Jewish groups think antisemitism claims are exaggerated

Via Jerusalem Post:

US Jewish leaders are outraged that Hungarian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Levente Magyar accused them of describing recent comments about antisemitism in Hungary as “exaggerated.” The remarks in question were actually made by US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, who in a speech about global antisemitism referred to recent developments related to the issue in Hungary.

Power criticized a Hungarian state honor awarded to the journalist Zsolt Bayer, a notorious figure known for his antisemitic and anti-Roma rhetoric. She also referred to a proposal to erect a statue in honor of Balint Homan, an official who was a Nazi collaborator in Hungary.

Magyar met last week in New York with a variety of Jewish leaders and representatives, after which he issued a press release, saying: “Every single one of his Jewish negotiating partners said they regarded as exaggerated the recent speech by UN Ambassador Samantha Power in which she voiced her opinion about alleged antisemitism in Hungary.

“His negotiating partners were fully aware that such exaggerated assessments are the result of distorted information and statements that are translated badly, probably intentionally,” Magyar said.

Jewish representatives Magyar met with included those from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee and Chabad, as well as Satmar hassidim and the chief rabbi of Munkács.

Several of those groups demanded a retraction, after which the Foreign Ministry changed the words “every single one” to “many.” Many of the groups publicly distanced themselves from Magyar’s remark.

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Op-Ed: Europe’s Most Notorious Jew-Baiter? It’s a Tie

Ben Cohen @ JNS:

Now, if I had to pick someone from that particular field, I’d have to conclude that it’s a tie for first place.

From Hungary: step forward Zsolt Bayer, journalist, fascist apologist, a founder of the ruling Fidesz party, and a confidante of that country’s Putinesque prime minister, Viktor Orban. From Great Britain: step forward Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, darling of Islamists both Shi’a – Hezbollah – and Sunni – the Muslim Brotherhood – and literally obsessed with the claim that the Zionist movement collaborated with Adolf Hitler during the 1930s. (His obsession has lasted so long, one wag on Twitter commented that he’d devised a drinking game where he downed a shot of gin every time Livingstone mentioned Hitler, with the result that he’s now living in a dumpster.)

I get that there are others who could stake a claim to the “most notorious” title. Like French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. Or the leaders of Greece’s neo-fascist Golden Dawn Party. Or the former British parliamentarian George Galloway. But I choose Bayer and Livingstone because together they neatly encapsulate the thematic fixations of post-war antisemitism: the undue political and economic influence of wealthy, powerful Jews, the insinuation that Jews invariably choose tribal conspiracy over national loyalty and the contention that the Jews themselves actively assisted the Nazi genocide that led to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

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